Life in a multicultural marriage

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People meet, fall in love and marry. Of course, it’s not that simple, but if we pretend that life is a movie, that we keep the remote in our hands and can forward from the beginning, it looks like that. As teenagers we hoped to meet a friend, a soul mate and a great love (of course). We could dream about how that person would look, what kind of personality he/she would have, probably even about his profession. But usually we do not have a thought of the nationality of our future spouse. It all comes later. It all comes after you meet, fall in love and say “I Do” with an accent.

To marry a foreigner can be very exciting and interesting. You always find something new with which to be surprised or irritated. Every day, day after day… How to deal with and enjoy different languages; culture; attitude to family, friends; different points of view on raising kids, planning vacations; cooking; sad and funny misunderstandings; communication with in-laws ?

This blog is for anyone who dated or married a foreigner, who lives in a foreign country with an accent, raises bilingual kids, trying to adjust and understand.

I am a Russian who married an American man. We met at a Halloween party in the US 12 years ago, and after two years got married in San Francisco. We later moved to Russia and lived there for almost eight years. We worked, rented a tiny apartment in Moscow and raised our two kids (my daughter from first marriage and a son). After almost 8 years, my husband got tired of Moscow, and he asked me and the kids to move back to America. He simply got tired of being a foreigner. He wanted to have a normal job, speak his language, be able to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with his family and he wanted to exchange our extremely small apartment in Moscow for a two-story house. And he especially wanted to forget all about Moscow’s long, cold winters. Well, I knew he had a right to wish all of this. He was patient enough all these years and it came my turn to pay him back. My husband and I and our two kids, moved from huge and exciting Moscow to the quiet and sunny suburbs of Atlanta. It became my turn to be a foreigner. What to do? In an international marriage one of the two will live abroad.

Here, in this blog, I share about my first and second year immigrant experiences, pitfalls and plateaus of cultural shock, and my hopes. I still try to find my way through Southern living with no driving skills and a strong attachment to my homeland. Since childhood I liked to write essays and poetry but only in Russian. When we moved to the US, along with homesickness, I got some free time to do what I always wanted to do. I joined the Atlanta Writers Club and trying to write in English, but still with a Russian accent.

I never had a blog before. I apologize in advance for any possible mistakes I make in my writing. It is not due to carelessness or absence of respect, it is simply because I learned English quite late in life, and, probably, I will always speak, write and live with an accent.